Authorities identify girl, 7, who died in Arizona desert after crossing Mexico border into US

Authorities have released the name of the 7-year-old Indian girl whose body was found in Arizona in an isolated area about a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Gurupreet Kaur – the young girl who died of heat stroke on Wednesday, June 12 – and her mother were among a group of five Indian nationals dropped off on the morning of Tuesday, June 11 by human smugglers in a remote border area near Lukeville and Quitobaquito Springs in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument Biosphere Reserve, the Customs and Border Patrol said in a statement. It’s a forbidding landscape in dry and arid area, located 17 miles west of Lukeville, a U.S. border town 50 miles southwest of Tucson.

The CBP described the terrain where the young girl was found as “rugged desert wilderness” and said anyone there would have “little to no resources.” Temperatures were around 108 degrees on the day the girl is believed to have died.

According to US authorities, the after walking some way, the girl’s mother and another woman went in search of water, leaving her daughter with another woman and her child.

U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jesus Vasavilbaso said that once the women went to look for water they never saw the children or the woman again. He told CNN that Border Patrol agents got the information on the girl’s movements from two women from India who told officials they’d been separated from a woman and two children traveling in their group hours earlier.

“Agents took the two women into custody and began searching the area north of the international border in remote terrain seven miles west of Quitobaquito Springs,” the agency said in a statement cited by the U.S. media. “Within hours, they discovered the little girl’s remains.”

CBP Air and Marine Operations and the National Guard used helicopters and other aircraft, joined by the Bureau of Land Management and other CBP agents, in the search for the migrants she’d been traveling with and found footprints indicating they returned to Mexico.

The incident shines the spotlight on rising illegal immigrants from India with people trying to cross into the U.S. through Mexico.

The CBP said that about 9,000 Indians were caught entering the U.S. illegally last year, a dramatic increase from the 3,162 in 2017.